Archive for February, 2017

Raise your hand if you have a teenager. Alright, so you know exactly what I’m talking about in my post title.

The Boy has just been making stupid decision after stupid decision lately, all concerning school and him trying to get out of doing all of the work tasked to him.

Now, if The Boy had actual difficulty with school I could sort of understand it. He’s at that point in junior high where they begin ramping up the homework to get kids ready for the harder world of high school.

The Boy doesn’t have that issue, though. School work comes exceptionally easy to him. Even when he complains about his pre-calc being “hard” he is getting it done within half an hour and getting an A on it.

Academically he is ridiculously gifted.

He’s just immature as hell. Like 8 year old level of maturity.

I could understand not wanting to stack his time after school with homework if he gained anything from it. But he doesn’t. The amount of time he can sit in front of a video screen doesn’t change. His bed time doesn’t change. Nothing changes.

Until his grades slip, we have numerous “discussions,” and he begins to lose his screen time entirely while he gets his grades back into shape.

This week he compounded that by breaking a mouth piece on his clarinet and not telling us for a week – at which point his band teacher emailed us to let us know what was going on, and having a poster project due in English that he didn’t tell us about, and now tried to use weekend plans to get out of doing it.

It’s just a vicious lack of maturity leading to a compounding of stupidity. And in eight about eight minutes when The Boy gets off the bus I get to run head on into this and deal with it. What I would give for just a week of non-stupid mistakes. Screw up but don’t do it because you’re being willfully stupid.

This weekend I was driving around far too much and I caught part of a cooking show on the radio. I love radio in the car. I loath putting a CD in the majority of the time, unless I’ve gotten something out of the library and I just want to make sure I listen to it before I have to return it. So, I’m driving around and I’m listening to the radio when this cooking show comes on and I’m like, Alright, this is good. I like cooking, I like people talking about cooking, I’m going to stick with this.

It wasn’t a bad show. I want to put that out there first, because other than that I’m not sure I’m going to say much else that’s positive because I have such a gripe about it. The main segment that I caught was talking about substituting things in recipes for various reasons, and the lead-up to this peaked my interest because why wouldn’t it? The idea of inserting weird things into common recipes to give them a twist, at least that’s what I was sort of thinking it would take for its direction.

And it did.

Except it was always taking out this pretty common (read: inexpensive) ingredient and popping in this much more expensive ingredient.

Now, we cook a lot of our meals. I would say that in any given week six of the seven nights of the week involves me standing over the stove. Shopping for ingredients isn’t uncommon and I’m pretty well accustomed to the prices I have to pay for most of what I want, and where I can skimp.

Which is where this radio show irritated me. Nothing against the substitutions themselves, which I’m sure would be at least interesting to try out. It’s more the price difference. There comes a point where continuously subbing out low cost ingredients for high cost ingredients does more damage to my finances than the benefits it brings to my table. And if your goal is to push people to diversify what’s on their table then putting a financial hurdle in front of them isn’t exactly the best place to start.